Toppers Says: Eat it Economy! Continues Growth

Many brands are struggling in this economy. That is an unfortunate fact. For us, we have been able to sustain by simply maintaining our visions and following our core values, especially: Give Customers What They Want!

Our success at Toppers really comes down to we have great food and great people. We have two signature products: Our Topperstix are cheesy covered breadstix that people order more often than pizza! The most popular is our world famous Triple Order. Our second point of difference vs. the competition is our wide selection of unique House Pizzas. We have some of the most unique pizzas in the pizza delivery category. Our Potato Toppers, Mac N Cheese, Cool C-B-R and Hangover Helper are examples of tasty pizzas you are just not going to find anywhere else. Giving customers what they want also includes our franchisee owners as they are our other set of customers. We have continued to grow in a rough economy because we have a system that produces ROI for our franchisees. The proof: in 2008 our stores averaged over $945,000 in sales with an average EBTDITA of 14.5 percent (as disclosed in our 2009 Franchise Disclosure Document). The other delivery competitors in our category are closer to an average of $600,000 in annual sales. Our stores are doing extremely high sales out of a small footprint of 1600 square feet. Our annual sales per square foot rival the biggest restaurant companies in the world. We have continued to grow because people see the success our franchise owners are having and new people want to jump on the Toppers train.

We do understand that the economy is definitely tough as people are being extremely choosy about where to spend their dining dollars. One of the most important things we have done is not panic like many of our competitors have done. We have not jumped into the deep discounting game to try to save our market share. We have looked for new ways to create value for our customers without putting our franchisees in the position where they are forced to try to make money on high food cost promotions. An example of this is our new MyZa sized pizza. This individual size pizza is unique in the industry. It is rectangular in shape and is cut into four right triangle slices. The MyZa is $4.99 for a 1 topping or $6.99 for one of our signature House pizzas. This new product has allowed us to do two things; create trial of our House Pizzas and provide a price point that attracts the solo eater.

We are also constantly looking at how we can improve the quality of our food. We look at trends and watch how consumers’ tastes are changing. We then come up with unique flavor combinations to match those trends. We aren’t afraid to try anything on our pizza. If Captain Crunch with jalapenos tastes good on a pizza then let’s try to sell it!

I guess I wouldn’t call us “innovators” in terms of marketing. Being a small company, we don’t have the resources the big national chains have at their disposal to be innovative. Although being smaller it gives us the opportunity to our hustle the big slow plodding chains. We do and say things in our marketing the big guys could never get away with doing. I would call our approach genuine and authentic. Our marketing is simply to be real in the eyes of our fanatics. To be successful we must know who we are and we know what our customers think of us.

At Toppers we love to have fun, it is a company core value. We want our customers to have fun too. So if we come out with some B.S. campaign that is not believable our customers will see right through it and hurt the brand long term. Our goal is simple create fanatics for life by creating personal moments and making emotional connections with each and every customer.

While I’m definitely not an economist, so my opinion probably doesn’t mean a whole lot, I think we are seeing signs that consumer confidence is growing. Hey, people still have to eat, right? You can only stay home and eat meatloaf so many times each week. Ordering pizza is like having a party delivered at an economical price to feed a group of people. The per person price of having pizza delivered compared to going out to a restaurant is so much less that we feel we have an advantage.

We are predicting the first part of 2010 might still be a little rough but the second half should see some modest growth. At Toppers we are expecting to continue our run of consecutive record sales with another year of growth.